Aperture Library – Slimming the Size
Recently I saw a posting to the Apple-hosted Aperture discussion forums about Aperture Library cruft. Apparently the poster discovered that if you delete referenced images from your Library the Library doesn’t actually get smaller. He had (naturally) assumed that the thumbnail images would be deleted and that the Library would be smaller. Why wasn’t it?
I figured that Aperture was storing thumbnails somewhere in the Library so that is the best place to start looking.
Well, the Aperture Library ‘file’ is actually a special kind of Folder that Finder pretends is a file. If you Control-Click on the icon in Finder you can choose to Show Package Contents. Inside that folder are files and folders that exactly mirror your Aperture layout. The icons that represent your Projects are also file/folder packages and you can open them and you will see some interesting files in there.
There are some big files in there, an AP.Thumbnails and an AP.Minis file that combined take up about 100MB of disk space. Spread that out over several dozen projects and you’ll see where a lot of your disk space is going. Apparently Aperture stores all of a Project’s thumbnails in a single (large) file and doesn’t trim that file down when an image is deleted. I don’t delete many images, but I do occasionally move a lot of images between Projects. I wondered if my Library was unnecessarily large.
I wonder what would happen if I deleted those .Thumbnails files, .Minis, and .Tinies files files?
Would Aperture properly regenerate them?
Well, the short answer is yes it will and everything seems to be OK.
My Library with very few Managed Masters and about 400 images with hi-res previews weighed in at 22.63GB. I deleted all of the .Thumbnails files, .Minis, and .Tinies files in my Library.
I launched Aperture and made sure to get it to rebuild all of the thumbnails (All Photos and scroll with the L key). A few hours later my Library was… wait for it… a little longer… 17.92GB.
I saved 4.7GB of space by making Aperture rebuild its thumbnail files.
I use a MacBook Pro. 4.7GB is not an inconsiderable amount of space.
What do you think?
Before
================================================================
Total Library size (Get Info): 22.63 GB (24,031,246,819 bytes)
Library.apdb (Get Info): 314.6 MB (329,904,128 bytes)
Totals
----------------------------------------------------
AP.Thumbnails : 17,225,880 KB
AP.Minis : 3,611,828 KB
AP.Tinies : 57,860 KB
JPEGs : 237,672 KB
: 218,052 KB
** why 2 totals? **
Deleted Thumbnails, Minies, Tinies
================================================================
Total Library size (Get Info): 2.7GB (2,634,581,366 bytes)
After
================================================================
Total Library size (Get Info): 17.92 GB (18,973,454,530 bytes)
Library.apdb (Get Info): 314.7 MB (329,949,184 bytes)
AP.Thumbnails : 13,035,704 KB
AP.Minis : 2,769,576 KB
AP.Tinies : 45,116 KB
JPEGs : 237,672 KB
: 218,052 KB
Notes
================================================================
Calculate size of all files of given extension
find . -name "*.AVI" -print0 | xargs -0 du -ch
http://wrecking.org/cbd/2007/11/16/unixtrix-calculate-size-of-all-files-of-given-extension/
Delete all files with a given suffix
find . -name "*.Thumbnails" -delete
Technorati Tags: Aperture, Apple
This post has 9 comments
April 24th, 2008
Very nice trick. I tested in my library with 70GB and I reduce more than 8GB.
Good, very very good.
Best
January 9th, 2009
Genius!
Thanks a lot… once I’m done with the library rebuild, that’s next on the hit parade…
February 27th, 2009
I think this is exactly what I need. I have 21,000 files, all referenced. I cant wait to try it!
However, I am wondering if you know a quick way to delete all the .thumb .tinies .minis in the package contents other than doing it by hand, one by one?
Many Thanks for the hint!
February 28th, 2009
I used the Unix find command.
To do this, open Terminal and type ‘find ‘ (don’t forget the space), drop your Aperture Library icon onto the Terminal window from the Finder, then type ‘ -name “*.thumb” -delete” and hit Return. Replace ‘thumb’ with ‘tinies’ ‘minis’, or whatever you want to delete.
The finished command would look like:
find /Pictures/Test -name “*.tinies” -delete
Make sure you update your Vaults before doing this so you can revert if you have to.
May 6th, 2009
Good article – I just tried this with the find command – and one update…
I needed to use “Thumbnails” “Minis” and “Tinies” (Note the case sensitivity)
Also, you can use -print instead of the -delete command for peace of mind to check you’re getting the right files before deleting them!
November 19th, 2010
Does anyone know if this is still an issue in Aperture 3?
It might just be me, but I think my library is suffering from this.
Any ideas ?
November 22nd, 2010
@Jonathan – I’m not sure if this affects Aperture 3, but the Library layout has changed so be careful before you delete anything!
December 4th, 2011
I tried this and saved a lot of space.
One Aperture 3 library shrank from 63 to 24GB.
It then took a few hours to rebuild the thumbs & previews.
However I now find that all my thumbnails for photos in the portrait format are distorted and look stretched.
In fact most thumbnails are very fuzzy and sometimes the photo preview takes ages to load.
Also the books I had designed take ages to load and many of the photos look completely distorted.
I was hoping for a speed saving, but that doesn’t seem to have happened.
Any tips on how to remedy this?
Peason
December 5th, 2011
It sounds like your thumbnails files may be corrupted. What I did was quit Aperture and make a backup of my Aperture Library. If you Control-click on the Aperture Library you can choose Show Package Contents. Inside there is a Thumbnails folder which I deleted. Upon relaunching Aperture it will start re-rendering thumbnails on each image as it gets loaded/viewed. This process can take a really long time. It did fix my thumbnails issue.
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